World Trends on DAISY Development(Gregory Kearney)

Gregory Kearney

Manager, Accessible Media Association for the Blind of Western Australia

I am Greg Kearney, and I am an adult profound dyslexic, and I am one of the few adults that you will ever meet who will admit to it. I was diagnosed will dyslexia at the age of 8. At that time, there were no schools or really any programs at all for dyslexics in the United States. I received some education from the then-called Royal National Institute for the Word Blind in England, before the creation of Landmark School in the United States. I was in the original class, accepted in Landmark School in 1971. I eventually graduated from\we didn't graduate from Landmark School because they couldn't graduate people at that time\I left Landmark and went to Old Grove Colburn, a small Quaker preparatory school in Maine. At the time I left Landmark I was considered the shining example of what could be done. They had taken a person who didn't read at all and managed to get my reading up to about the grade 3 reading level. The last time I was tested for reading ability was in graduate school in the United States, where I tested at a high 3rd grade, low 4th grade reading level. I am also now a user of Daisy. I am also the manager of Accessible Media, an association for the blind in Western Australia, in Perth, Australia. The first part of my presentation will concern dyslexics and the use of Daisy. Much of this is drawn from my own personal experience. I am noted for having rather strong personal opinions. Most of you know what dyslexia is. For those of you who may not be familiar, it is an organic, physical disability which prevents the person from properly processing written language. In my case, I am kind of your classic male dyslexic, all the reversing of letters, those sorts of issues, that I can't keep my left and right hands straight without wearing a ring. Those sorts of issues. It's a physical disability, not necessarily a mental one. By definition, dyslexics are supposed to have normal intelligence.

How do dyslexics use Daisy? Any number of ways. The problem is that dyslexia, just like blindness, is a continuum of disability. You could say that someone who wears glasses is visually impaired, but they don't need any special accommodation because they have glasses. If you took the glasses away from them, they would probably be unsafe to operate an automobile. The same thing happens with dyslexia. There are mild dyslexics, there are profound dyslexics, and there are very seriously affected dyslexics who no matter how much time and effort are put into their education never master reading.

Each of those groups will use Daisy in different ways, and the way we use Daisy changes as we go through education. Daisy used for dyslexics in early primary grades is primarily used as a teaching tool to help them learn to read.

The theory being if they can see the words and hear the words simultaneously, they will by that method improve their reading ability without Daisy, reading conventional print.

I have in my youth been exposed to more different schemes that try to present themselves as the cure for dyslexia than you can possibly imagine. And none of them ever really took root and really worked. I have grave personal doubts that this latest scheme using Daisy will prove anymore effective.

But perhaps it will for some persons with mild dyslexia. The next way we use it, is we use it very much like the way the blind use it, is that we use it as a means to obtain information. In that use, which is the way I use it, the way probably most adult dyslexics would use it, the appearance of the words is far less important.

I compare sync Daisy, using sync Daisy with words, to something like going to a subtitled movie. I hate subtitled movies because every time I go to one I try to read the English and I fall farther and farther behind and the words disappear before I can ever get around to reading them.

The same thing happens with me and the synced word Daisy. If I slow down the Daisy recording slow enough to be able to process the printed words on the screen, I might as well go get the book and read it. So all the advantages that Daisy gave me, particularly in terms of speed, in terms of being able to bring my reading speed up to or even in excess of a person with normal reading ability, was just lost to me. So generally when I use Daisy, and many adult dyslexics I know use Daisy, they turn off the synchronization. They don't want to see the words.

What we do want to see, however, are the illustrations. Having the illustrations in the book remains important to us because as the text is being read to us we want to be able to look at the illustrations. Sometimes students have access to both the recordings and the print book.

That's how I went through college. I had the recorded books and the print one. Anytime they made reference to an illustration I could flip over the page and look at the illustration. That may not always be the case as we move into digital books, and people won't be having the physical book any longer. The irony is that the ClassMate, which was mentioned, was the first Daisy playback device specifically designed for dyslexics and learning disabled students; it displays the text beautifully, but doesn't display any pictures.

So the one thing we want is the one thing they don't display. So that explains somewhat how dyslexics use these Daisy books. Daisy is not a cure. People keep looking for the golden key that will unlock the door of dyslexia and make the problem go away. Daisy is not it. Daisy is a tool to allows us to function in a world of reading people, and presenting it as some sort of magic cure all, that you're going to be able to expose dyslexics to Daisy, and after a few years they're just going to magically be able to read conventional print at speed and efficiency level, is not going to happen, anymore than putting blue sheets of cellophane over printed pages did, or Kerscher's rotating mirror did, or any of the other devices and techniques that have been tried. Some dyslexics may get a great deal of benefit from seeing words go by and others won't. We're a very diverse group of people with a wide ranging range of disability. But I wanted to make that clear. Do not expect this technology to solve what is fundamentally an educational problem.

Best practices. The best Daisy books for dyslexics are probably the ones in which the text is present, and certainly ones in which the illustrations are present. Remember, dyslexics aren't blind. We see things; we just can't process written language well. Having a book that has both is probably the best, but if it's a choice between, as I always say at ABWA, if it's a choice between a book or no book, any book is better than no book at all. Human narration is good, but is quite expensive and time consuming to do. I have examples here of synthetic narration done for a college textbook we did for the University of Western Australia. The other practice for dyslexics is to remember that they will use it in ways that you didn't envisage that they might use it. They may require extensive note-taking abilities. I use from HumanWare, there is this Victor Reader Stream, and on this particular one, we use it in Western Australia because we have adopted the American cartridge system, the USB cartridge system they use in the United States. This is good because it allows me to take a note that is auditory.

Dyslexics routinely\I used to drive college professors crazy. I'd sit in their class and never write a note all the way through. They would come unglued on me sometimes and say, why aren't you taking notes in class, you need to take notes.

And I would say I can take a note, but I won't be able to read it when I get home, so what good does it do if I take a note? Well, this allows me to take notes.

These kinds of devices are very useful for dyslexics because they allow me to sit here and press the little record button and bookmark the place in a book and take a note. Something I was never able to do. The other thing that is very important for dyslexics, and for the blind, is if you are making books, make them as complete as possible. That means page numbers.

Many of the books we make at ABWA in Perth for general consumer-type reading are converted from old tape masters and we can't include a lot of Daisy navigation in them, beyond tape side navigation. And we can't include page numbers. Page numbers are really, really important for dyslexics and for the blind because you always get teachers saying, read page 25 to 37, and pages 72 to 103. Without it, finding those points in those books is almost impossible; but with it, push the little button, push in page 25 and whoosh, up it goes to page 25, just like it is supposed to. That's important. It's really important for students, dyslexic students, for recreational reading perhaps a little less so because you listen to novel from start to finish, you don't go to the 3rd chapter of it.

To explain how we're implementing this in Western Australia, in Western Australia we have a project called "Beyond Books Beyond Barriers", as sponsored by the Association for the Blind in Western Australia and the Speld Dyslexic Foundation in Western Australia.

It's unique in all the world's talking book libraries in that we have a library for the disabled and for the public, and we are probably the first one in the world doing mass distribution of Daisy books to the general public as well as to persons with disabilities.

We do this by giving the public access to our talking book library by having two collections. We have a public domain collection, works that lie in the public domain that have long since run their copyright, the copyright has run out, for which we can give the general public access. We also have an agreement with a few publishers who have allowed us to take their copyrighted works and give them to the general public, though that is pretty rare. We also have a collection of talking books, which we have bought and which we have produced over the years in studios. General reading, mostly fiction, that is copyright controlled. Also, all of the textbooks we produce for schools and colleges in Western Australia fall under this category. Two separate collections, and when you encounter them you get two books.

If we go here, and I'll very quickly do this, www.guide.wa.org, you'll see Beyond Books Beyond Barriers. This is a search, you search just shy of 60,000 books. Some have been recorded, some of them haven't, and so if you type in Twain, you get the author, you'll get works by Mark Twain, which are all out of copyright, and so you can say that you want the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oh look, it's not been produced. You can click on production, say I'm a reader, fill out the form, we get the form, we process the book, either from human recordings, if we can find them; if not, we do it with synthetic speech, and load the book back onto the server, and you get an e-mail saying you're book has been produced, it's ready for you to download. At present it takes us about 48 hours to go from request to finished book.

However, if you ask for a copyrighted book, you'd see a notice that tells you this is a copyrighted work. You have to be disabled and have a file, a record with us that you are disabled. So the process is, an individual or library requests the book, it comes to us, we produce it, we produce a Daisy digital talking book, we can also produce E-PUB, we can produce Braille. You have a choice on that form as to what format you need. We always produce Daisy; we'll produce E-PUB, Braille, large print on request. Then you get a notice back, and it goes back into that collection for everyone else to use. We use human narration where possible. Where we can find a human narration we will use it. Where not possible, we use synthetic speech, text-to-speech technology.

Australia is an English speaking country, and we use text-to-speech from Apple Computer because Apple has released its speech free for use in the production of talking books, without paying a royalty for the right to use the speech. It's a financial decision. Even if it sounds like a mid-Western American accent, that's what we're using because anything else would be horrifically expensive. We looked at other voices, and we couldn't have borne the cost. We do distribution based on the Internet. Most people can download them. We have done CD ROMs before and continue to do. When we do textbooks, we make them up on CD ROMs and give two CD ROMs to the college. One to distribute to the student and one to distribute to keep for themselves in case the student has a problem or something. And we do US speed distribution. We mail books to clients. We have a free postal system, similar to most countries. We mail these cartridges. We mail them inside old fashion tape cases, which we've modified to be able to accept the new cartridges. We had like 10,000 of these things, and we weren't going to go out and buy new cases. We have a little woodshop in our facility, and they sit down and take a little grinder and grind off the posts and modify the boxes. This is good because these things have already been approved by Australia Post. So Australia Post knows about these yellow boxes. We use them, Vision Australia uses them, and everybody in the country uses them. So we don't have to teach the post office a new trick, essentially.

In summary, our system in Australia, our copyright laws, much like that in United States, and probably similar to that in Japan, is based on an exemption. Australia is unique, has some unique features, one of which was the copyright exemption designed to try to coax publishers into using Daisy books themselves, rather than have all the agencies do it. The copyright exemption says we are free to make a Daisy book, except when the publisher has for sale a Daisy book. The theory was that we would coax publishers into making accessible books, same thing for Braille. We can produce a Braille book, except if the publisher offers for sale a Braille book. So far, no publisher has ever ponied up with either Braille or Daisy. But we do have to contact the publisher and ask them, do you have Braille, do you have Daisy. No? Okay. I guess we're free to go. Australian law also has one unique feature which is not found I believe anywhere else in the world. We have a provision which allows the use of talking books by persons who did not receive an education because of governmental action in Australia. This is pointed specifically at the Aboriginal Australian community, which was for many, many years in Australia denied access to the public schools. So there were people who didn't have the opportunity to receive an education. That group of persons is also permitted access to the talking book system. That is a uniquely Australian solution to a uniquely Australian problem.

I have left five minutes to answer questions, which I was told would be advisable. I don't know how you want to handle that. No questions. We're going to do questions later. So it looks like Marcus gets an extra five minutes of time.